American Library Association releases list of top banned books of 2011

It’s National Library Week, and libraries around the country are celebrating the “freedom to read.” They’re putting out displays of those books that are most often challenged to bring attention to the problem of censorship.

There were 348 challenges reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2011, according to the American Library Association, and in conjunction with Library Week the organization has released a list of the 10 most challenged titles of 2011. You can see the full list below.

Books have been banned across time. In 1939 the East St. Louis Public Library burned John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath because it contained “vulgar language.” A teacher in Tulsa, Okla., was fired for assigning Catcher in the Rye to an eleventh grade English class in 1960. The teacher appealed and was reinstated by the school board, but the book was removed from use in the school. As recently as 2007, Toni Morrison’s Beloved was pulled from the senior Advanced Placement (AP) English class at Eastern High School in Louisville, Ky., because two parents complained that the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about antebellum slavery depicted the inappropriate topics of bestiality, racism, and sex.

And the stories go on…there are hundreds upon hundreds of them.

The American Library Association maintains a list of banned and challenged classics that’s based on the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th century list. In the slideshow below you’ll find a sampling of those books that have been challenged again and again.

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American Library Association releases list of top banned books of 2011